While technically in Brent North the elections for local councillors for the Preston and Fryent wards of Brent still need reporting – and where better then here?

Brent Councils Local Democracy pages have lots of information on the elections which will take place on the 16th June 2005.

Shahrar Ali will be standing in the Preston Ward as the Green Party Candidate. The Greens didn’t have a candidate in Brent North at the last election so it will be interesting to see how Shahrar and the Greens do in Preston – a gague of Green support in Brent North if you will. The ward has had Conservative councillors in the past… Let’s see if we can get some Green on this map.

The film of the Brent East STW hustings is one of a number of films documenting the views of Prospective Parliamentary Candidates on the aggressive action taken against Iraq. The Catch Your MP project aims to hold to account the 412 Members of the 2001-2005 Parliament that voted in support of military action.

Candidates for Brent East: Shahrar, Sarah, Yasmin, Kwasi and George along with Rocky (Wasn’t that a Rainbow cast?) who was standing in Brent South all spoke and responded to questions from the floor.

After stressing the pacifist credentials of the Green Party, Shahrar gives an articulate response to the question ‘Do you support an end to the Anglo-US occupation of Iraq and a speedy withdrawal of troops?’ His view is that troops would be ‘better of not there’ but adds the important qualification that there is a need, following the aggressive military intervention and the destruction caused, for support and that troops should remain ’subject to the will of the Iraqi people’.

Yasmin used the platform to distance herself once again from the party that took Britain into an pre-emptive war and to stress that she’s more ‘anti-war’ than anyone else. Kwasi picks up on this distance and points out that Yasmin is not standing for the Yasmin Qureshi party but is standing as the PPC for the Labour Party. With supporting calls of ’shame’ from the audience, Kwasi reminds us all that being the Labour PPC means that she is representing the Labour Government.

Yasmin rolled up her sleeves and revealed her ‘Old Labour Till I Die’ tattoo while explaining her interpretation of the ‘choices’ (A new Labour word) available to the electorate in Brent East. ‘The Labour Party is the party of the organised working class by the trade union movement’ she said. ‘It contains many thousands of people who are part of the anti-war movement who are socialist and internationalist as well’ and had the ‘largest parliamentary group who opposed the war’. ‘The working class traditions of these MPs meant that they did not flinch in their opposition to the war, once it had began’. She then goes on to name check Ken Livingstone and Tony Benn the anti-war and anti-imperialist Labour party stalwarts who have given her support.

Sarah reminds everyone of the Lib Dem opposition to military action and highlights the damage that has been done to public confidence in politics and the loss of trust in government due to the secrecy and constant redefinition of reasons and evidence given by in support of this conflict.

The highlight of the film was Shahrar Ali, dressed in a orange boiler suit, logically destroying the argument for detention without trail – another Labour policy innovation from the last parliament.

Download. Link propagate.

Catch Your Own MP.

Trawling through the list of refering links to this site I came across a search engine, A9.com, that I hadn’t heard of. I followed the link to discover where this blog was ranked on the list that refered the reader to the blog. Just below the link to this blog was a link to Film Makers Against War.

I wish I’d seen the film made of the Brent East Stop The War Hustings earlier.

Here’s a link to the movie. I’ve mirrored it here to save their bandwidth.

More on this to come after I’ve had my European Politics Exam.
Prizes to whoever watches the film and then posts here with the best guess to the comment I’ve going to make.

I’ve been digging around into the rules around election expenses. I’m trying to calculate the maximum permitted expenses a candidate or agent may incur in Brent East. Thankfully the Electoral Commission website is a wealth of information on electoral law and regulations.

Election expenses are those ‘expenses incurred whether before, during or after the election, on account of or in respect of the conduct or management of the election’. They may only be incurred by the candidate, his election agent or persons authorised in writing by that agent.

The calculation for permitted expenses for a Borough/Burgh/District Constituency is £5483 plus 4.6p per elector. So how many electors are there in Brent East? According to Brent Council Electoral Services there are 56227 persons on the Electoral Roll for Brent East.

Here’s my ‘back of a fag packet’ calculation. 56227 electors * 4.6 pence = £2586.44 + £5483 = £8069.44 Additionally a candidate may incur £600 of personal expenses without providing individual recipts to their election agent.

I calculate the maximum permitted expenditure at £8669.44

As candidates have to submit their expenses to the Returning Officer within 35 days of the result being announced we’ll see who spent what soon enough.

Over 6 weeks & 53 postings the Brent East Campaign has been blogged. My keyboard is wornout and revision for my exams in backlog. This has been a prolonged high – which explains my recent apearance. I thought I’d review my efforts and share my experiences of the last six of weeks.

Brent East Campaigning: The campaign
In the tense 10 minutes that the candidates stood with the returning officer and inspected the doubtful ballot papers I was sharing my impressions of the campaign with Paul Keilthy from Archant Media Group. I was impressed with the technical quality of the campaign run by Lib Dems and Labour; each party had created and distributed localised materials, and each had been able to rapidly turn around ‘news’ of events (e.g. names visiting) into publicity materials. Paul thanked me for publicising the campaign materials (the original stated goal of Brent East Campaigning blog) as the parties don’t distribute their campaign materials directly to the press. That’s twice I’ve been taked for doing somebodys job for them this last week.

The Lib Dems appear to have had greater resources at their disposal that Labour. Team:Yasmin may have been able to pull in the ‘names’ of old Labour but Team:Sarah was superior in people power. The Lib Dems were able to distribute a far greater quantity of campaign materials due to the number of voulenteers at their disposal. I’ve yet to discover if the LDYS were mobilised to support the Brent East Campaign in the same way that the Young Fabians were.

From a technology perspective, Team:Sarah already had an established web presense which provided a source of information on her candidacy. Team:Yasmin were severly lacking in this area. Not having a website must have been detrimental to her campaign. Anyone using a search engine to uncover information about Yasmin would have been presented with a series of news articles – some more favorable than others – as well as a link to this site, whereas the search results for the Blue Team and the Orange Team yeilded links to official information sites.

I have been monitoring the ‘refering links’ statistics (see Note 1) for my website. The blog has been viewed by people refered to it after using the names of candidates in search engines (see Note 2). Another popular search term is Brent East. Searching for Brent East in Google gives the results of my blog, the websites of the Lib Dems and the Conservatives but not Labour. Even Rainbow George manages to make the first page of links (see Note 3).

Brent East Campaigning: Misrepresentation
My Brent East Campaigning blog did not cover the whole constituency. A more accurate title would have been ‘Mapesbury, Queen’s Park and Kilburn Campaigning’ as these are the areas I have gathered most of my information from. Perhaps I should have done a little ward walking. In hindsight that would have been valuable as my favorite ‘finds’ of materials have been picked off the street. Additionally, the two main contenders in the recent campaign, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, produced campaign materials that targeting specific communities in the constituency. I would have liked to have been able to post materials from other areas in Brent East. The opportunity to compare and contrast materials from other areas of the constituency would have been interesting: were the candidates/parties emphasing different aspects of their manifesto in different area?

Brent East Campaigning: Participation
My active contribution to this blog over the last 6 weeks totalled 53 postings. I don’t even know how many hours total was spent meeting candidates, scanning campaign materials and researching details. This blog has been viewed by 816 unique visitors (measured by IP address) and I’ve recevied 5 emails from readers contributing information and one comment on a posting. I would have liked to have seen greater contributions from Brent East residents, but I feel that given that the blog was only running for 8 weeks total without link propagation (other than Richard Kimbers Election resources page) the level of readership and contribution was high.

Brent East Campaigning: Pretty Pictures
Here are some images grabbed from StatCounter.com
This graphic shows the daily ‘hits’ to the blog since my first post up to the day of the election.

This graphic shows period from 9th April to 9th May.

This graphic shows the period 3rd May to 9th of May in detail…

Note 1: A refering link is the link that directed a viewer to a website. This information was collected by StatCounter.com as part of their basic counter service.
Note 2: Google has been the search engine responsible for around 95% of my refering links.
Note 3: I would link to it but that ‘breaks’ my listing in Google, so just visit google.com and search for Brent East…

Germaine Greer has some advice for newly elected politicians – don’t wear little red suits. You’ll have to listen to the Radio 4 Any Answers stream of the show to hear it…

Not awake at 415am? Shame as you missed Sarah’s victory speech! If you want to watch it you can thanks to the BBC.

Paul Palmer of the Evening Standard, who was having terrible trouble with his laptop when trying to submit his story, writes about the Brent East result. He focuses on Yasmin loosing rather than Sarah winning.

More later, when google news advises me of it!

I’ve woken up and eaten – needed to do that before posting anything. NK and I left the count after Sarah Teather had been returned as the MP for Brent East, but not before posting to sarah teather is my MP. I’ve still got the ‘wild eyes’ I had yesterday, although that’s now from lack of sleep. This politics junkie had quite an Election Day.

As I posted yesterday, I’d been out and about in Mapesbury and Willesden with June Thomas from Slate Magazine. You can hear a dispatch from June made before the election on NPR. After giving June a whistle-stop tour of Willesden, I had an afternoon of revision to do before going to the count in the evening.

And what a night. I want to thank Shahrar Ali and Rowan Langley from the Green Party for inviting me to join their party at count. That was probably one of the best ‘lock ins’ I’ve ever been too. It was a night of tension and drama with the Brent East result called last after stacking and restacking of bundles of ballots. And at the end of it all Sarah Teather is STILL my MP.

I’m reminded of the Banksy piece in Barcelona Zoo. Tally mark after tally mark after tally mark. From what I’m seeing as I tally out the ballots as they come out of the box for the collate before the count, it really is neck and neck.

For every one vote the Greens receive, the Conservatives are getting seven, the Liberal Democrats 45 and Labour 47 = 100 votes.

Thats my personal tally count taken from a few different wards and averaged.

Close. Real Close. But the Greens could still take it!

Well, I didn’t expect that I’d be at the count for the Brent constituencies General Election ballot. But strange things happen in blogsphere…

I’m joined by NK a friend from Goldsmiths. We’re surounded by more rosets than a horse show. It is a three legged…sorry…horse race (sorry Kwasi) after all!

Some of the ballot boxes have arrived already but the count isn’t fully underway.

Results as and when I get them!

/rob